Horsekeeping (7 page)

An eager beaver that first year in 1989, I awaited a grand flotilla of natural beauty, song and especially wildlife: that perfect idyll, that serene arcadia. I sat back to enjoy the parade. But I made a poor witness, my sensory awareness dulled by the animated Disney and TV of my youth in nature-parched northern New Jersey topped off by fourteen years pounding the pavements of Philadelphia and New York City. Simple contrast was not enough to yield true appreciation. After the first blush of amazement had passed, I tried to deny my disappointment. I looked so hard and saw very little from my imagined preview.

There were exciting moments, like a bobcat on the deck of our first house, stealthy, short-tailed and catlike, but wild. Or the fawn that slept against the hillside in our yard for the entire day, until, out of fear for its health, I approached it with a carrot. Of course it upped and fled, rendering me naïve and ridiculous. Apparently, does often park their newborns in a “safe” environment while they graze nearby if not exactly within sight. This mama did not anticipate do-gooder urbanites wielding orange sticks at their progeny. Stubbornly childlike, I still worked at my adventures to take things up a notch.

One night in our first house I awoke to a strange keening. The dark and the night had both enticed and terrified me for many years. Night noises are fearsome in the “quiet” of the country, not conducive to sleep for the neurotic. I had often awoken those early years, convinced that some animal or an escaped maniac was about to get us. It is unnerving at first to be so exposed. I was accustomed to living in a high rise apartment inaccessible to intruders, the building entrance policed by vigilant
doormen, and my own front door satisfyingly bolted with steel. In a country house, locking doors seems silly with ground floor windows in abundance and no near neighbors to attend my screaming SOS. Ditto security systems: by the time the lone state trooper patrolling sixty square miles arrives, my assailant could have me carved up, roasted on a spit, the dinner dishes done, and be well on his way to Foxwoods casino.

So I avoided staying by myself in Salisbury, and the few times I braved it, breathless panic courtesy of my overly keen attention to what was not in every shadowed corner I investigated spared me little sleep. It wasn't until my forty-fifth year that I stopped being afraid alone at night. It took two kids and a husband to convince me that any “alone time” was too precious to waste a second of it worrying about some backwoods Joad trying to kill me. Kids helped me get over a lot of things in life, if not exactly grow up, and I replaced my irrational fear for my own safety with more rational ones regarding my kids. Now when I am alone in the country, I lie in bed worrying about Jane or Elliot in a taxi accident or an apartment fire, the homicidal lunatic on my own tail be damned.

Well, back to the strange noise. It was the wail of a lone child in the woods.

“Scott, wake up,” I whispered, propped on my elbows with ears tuned.

“What? What's the matter?”

“Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“A scream or a screech.”

“I don't hear anything. Just go back to sleep,” he yawned. “It's probably just some animal.”

“SHHH,” I cupped my ear. “Listen.”

We turned our heads toward the open window. The cry echoed again, clear and eerie.

“That. It sounds like a baby,” I said, certain.

“Why would a baby be out in the woods?”

“I don't know. Lost, maybe?”

We heard it again, loud and clear. It had to be human.

“Let's go find it.” I was wide awake, heart pounding toward a rescue mission.

“You've got to be kidding.” Scott locked my eyes to check my mental health.

“Well, I'm going,” I said, petulant.

I fumbled on my robe, slipped into Scott's Docksiders and plodded out into the dewy night. Billions of crickets and frogs chirped and bellowed. The night is
loud
around here. What do they mean “dead of night”? Everything is not just living, but partying. A misnomer equivalent to “sleep like a baby”: if you've had one, rocking and singing to it for hours before stealthing back to your own forgotten bed, you know the truth. “Sleep like a teenager”—try waking one up in time for school—would be the more appropriate saying.

I didn't think to pack a flashlight, but no matter, I was pumped. I strained my ears toward the desperate call.
Come on
, I urged,
Where are you
? I jumped off the deck into the brush.
Snakes
? I high stepped to perch on a rock. It was very dark. That's why I needed Scott—power in numbers. I'm big on ideas, but cowardly in follow-through.

I strained with listening.

Nothing.

The sound ended as mysteriously as it began. Foolish once again, I swatted at the mosquitoes planting bites on my ankles and temples that would plague me for days. I crept back into bed, inching so as not to wake my husband who, with a little luck, would forget all of this by morning. My expectation of tending to some ethereal changeling or injured, grateful animal lay fallow. Some years later a radio program informed me that certain nocturnal animals sound just like babies crying, and many people just like me have gone a'hunting for to save them.

One autumn night several years later, Scott and I joined a group of Nature Conservancy-led hikers to call for owls. Only a few hardy souls signed up, but this smacked of adventure—dark and wild, yet with a
protector who knew the territory. I had read
Owl Moon
to my son, a lovely children's book about a boy and his father summoning owls, and I have always wanted to communicate with any animal on its own terms. Frank led us across protected land to a fen, swampy with dead, leafless trees. Their bleached trunks silhouetted starkly, even against the moonless sky. On the way, Frank gamely suggested we douse our flashlights. Blind in the black dark, we intuited the verge of the trail with the edges of our shoes. It was slow-going, and I instinctively looked downward to spy the trail.

My eye caught something aglow.

“Frank, what is that?” I asked, uselessly pointing to the verge.

“Where?”

Feeling for his arm, I led him to a white, irregular rectangle, motionless but brightening under our gaze. Frank squatted to better identify.

“Wow, that's cool. It's a fungus that makes phosphorus. It's quite unusual to see one so large.”

I glowed with pride at my find.

Of course we didn't disturb the glowing fungus of our nature hike, but we all had a good look, and it proved the highlight of the night. For all our expert and inexpert calling, no unwise owls flew over to astonish us with their graceful beauty. Again, I would have to wait to see one of my favorite creatures. To this day I have only seen a few in the wild, swooping across the road at night, too quick for me to see their big eyes and charming head swivel. Occasionally I hear their nightly hoots in the woods behind our house though, and I reply my own toward conversation.

All in all, Salisbury was not as exciting as I had imagined with nonstop adventure, action, stunning beauty, animals in abundance, creepy woodsmen and peasanty women. Isn't that what we've been fed through wilderness epics, pioneer stories, and fairy tales, not to mention notions of romantic environments and the sublime still filtering into us through literature, paintings and the movies: raw nature, red in tooth and claw, and beautiful like the candy-colored Land of Oz? Instead, my new country
life, lived only on the weekends (part of the problem), flowed awkwardly. Flashes of brilliance only intermittently punctuated long periods of ho-hum that I strove to gussy up into my literary-romantic, Wild Kingdom wardrobe of “the country.”

Only after years of slow understanding, when I stopped working so hard, relaxed and let it happen, did I begin to find the under-layer of wonder in the ever changing, far from perfect, often smallish miracles that make up New England country life. Individually these moments may seem paltry—like that first hummingbird that arrives at my feeder the same week each May. But over time and with patience they added up, and I sensitized to them. That ruby-throated flutterer became spectacular when I figured him possibly the very same individual from last year, counting on my reliable refreshment after an arduous migration from the Yucatan Peninsula. And this year he lingered by my ear, drinking from the hanging petunia blooms as I read and dozed in the shade of the porch. Or the Monarch butterfly that enjoyed a long rest on Jane's knee; or the chipmunks that play hide and seek with our dog along the tunnels of the stone wall.

Such encounters filled the freed-up space my departing dullness availed, and nature and I inched toward each other. Eventually I reached a level of fullness, an accumulation of experiences, ordinary and exceptional, such that I was often overwhelmed by all I increasingly witnessed. When I
waited
, this environment offered up simple and complex high notes to my more sensitive and receptive self. Never diminishing or growing tedious, every new and repeated experience elicited more satisfaction and deeper happiness. I was taught to read this particular place: the exquisite nature I sought in the beginning was there all along—mine now, not because I muscled it, but rather received it as a gift to my now humbler self.

With my adjusted powers of awareness, Salisbury's genteel profusion of renewable beauty often hits me with exceptional clarity. Especially in the summer I experience an almost chemical happiness when I
drive along the many familiar scenic routes, both main and back roads. These emollient days—the sun blares but not in my eyes, warming my skin. The trees' highest leaves, encouraged by the west wind, tickle the expanse of blue sky, their rustle a lively chorus. The road is smooth, clear and clean from yesterday's thunderstorm. Feeling light and perfectly content, even dying might be acceptable. I'm in the now, the moment, not bothered by the past or anticipating the future—so exquisite, it's enough for one lifetime. It lasts about a minute or two if I am lucky. Ahhhhh . . . but hold on.

What's that
?

Oh no
.

Please don't let it be
....

But there it is.

Road kill.

A once robust, happy-go-lucky raccoon, now freshly dead, its back half smeared along the macadam, red and raw, an extended intestine, a petite black paw curled in; or, a week old carcass, bloated beyond belief, arms sticking out like the fingers of an inflated surgical glove; or the flattened, soggy fur of one such balloon recently exploded.

I will never harden to road kill, and could shed tears for each and every one if I let myself. I had read about the naturalist poet Barry Lopez, who pulled over to retrieve every flattened critter he came across, make-shifting a grave and whispering a prayer. I feel the urge to be so noble, but am usually time-deprived, or not dressed properly, or afraid of disease, or I tell myself
I'll get it on the way back
, or, or, or.... Instead, I well up from helplessness and try to save the overflow of emotion for the damaged-but-not-yet-dead,
about-to-be
-road kill: the ultimate bane of country life. With so much driving amongst copious wildlife, murder happens from the best of us. While it is amazing how many chipmunks and squirrels manage to race themselves around the obstacle course of four tires on the move, the raccoons, opossum and deer aren't quite so gymnastic.

BAM!

One minute we were heading contentedly home from a summer stock play at the Sharon Playhouse, late afternoon, refraining
My Fair Lady
—
All I want is a room somewhere, far away from the cold night air
. . .—the next we faced death. A large deer tore out of the tall corn stalks lining the road on our right. Only a fraction of a second's glimpse of brown fur in motion out of the corner of my eye preceded our plowing into it with the front end of our small Honda.

“Oh my God, oh my God!”

The impact pushed us left into the oncoming traffic lane, mercifully clear of vehicles. My friend Paula gripped the steering wheel and wrestled us back into our lane, all the while shoveling that poor animal about half a mile down the road. It fell away fifty yards before we managed to stop.

“Oh my God, oh my God!” Paula repeated.

“Paula! It's okay. You did great. We're all okay. Are you okay Elliot?” I'm pretty good in a crisis.

“Yeah. What happened?” he asked, wide-eyed.

“We hit a deer. Did you fall forward or hit your head or anything?”

“No. I mean I came forward but didn't hit anything.”

“He came out of nowhere,” Paula moaned.

“I know, I know. There's no way you could have avoided him.”

I looked out the back window. The deer lay still. I again checked that we were all intact and shakily exited the car. The driver behind us had already stopped where the deer was sprawled out.
Please let it be dead,
I silently begged, knowing a bad scene could be exponentially worse if we had to deal with a slowly dying, panicked animal. I didn't want myself, but especially not my son to witness anything so dreadful, not yet. I instructed Paula to wait with Elliot. I jogged back meeting a man from the house across the street who had heard the collision and ran out to help.